Assessing the knowledge of letter sounds is extremely important in preschool. If a child knows the sounds of the letters and has the ability to orally blend and segment sounds to read and write words then this child is likely to be successful in reading and writing in Kindergarten.
Of course I am going to take into consideration all the important reading and writing behaviors expected for the age of the child but for that I use different assessment tools.
This post is to share with you what I have developed for assessing the knowledge of letter sounds.
With the template I created the child (or the teacher if it is too tiring for the child) colors the letters as the child says its sound.
Once the letters are colored the child can ‘see’ how many she or he knows and the others become a learning goal.
Once the child colors all the letters it gives the child such a sense of accomplishment, and by then the child is usually doing guided reading which is heavy in comprehension, word attack strategies and becoming an independent reader.
I usually use this assessment at the beginning of the school year, December and end of the school year, usually end of May or June.
The child shown below is moving to another country so we had a short conference about her portfolio and we decided we should complete all the assessments that I will do later in the month with the other students.
Below are the templates for assessing knowledge of Upper and Lower case letter sounds. Just click on the images do download the template.
Here are the blank templates for you to write the letters as you teach them in your class.
I suggest to demonstrate the assessment to the class before you do it with the individual student.
If you have a projector and a white board or an interactive board you can easily do this.